Lindsay S. Shaffer

hella FOMO

browsing the timeline during #sfn2025 #sfn #sfn25

#SfN25 Mini-symposium: Today at 2:00 pm PST | Cognitive Maps in the Prefrontal Cortex
Read the accompanying article by Veselic et al. in #JNeurosci
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1358-25.2025

at least I found the perfect readers

apparently postpartum can induce vision changes because guess who is now permanently farsighted and has a prescription for glasses 🎉

toured a private school for my daughter that preached STEM yet their science classrooms only designated boys as peer Chromebook experts 🥴

kindred spirit 😭

every time I see people arguing online they always both look like they exclusively drink water directly from a Walgreens bathroom sink

obv bc researchgate thinks it’s sketchy that someone still uses its website

singing to my newborn famous lullabies such as “baby’s on fire” by brian eno

I wonder how much Kandel’s stance has changed. during my postbac, I saw a talk by Kandel proposing that science and art fundamentally ask the same questions but answer them differently & dialogue between the two drives innovation. he even wrote a book about it!

which one of you drew these cute EEG onion people

(3/10) Additionally, we show that human NAc organization is not simply divided into “core” and “shell,” but instead reflects continuous spatial gradients of MSN subtypes linked to genetic risk for psychiatric and addiction-related traits.

Could you clarify what are the usage metrics for Google Scholar (ie number of users)? My understanding is declining usage led to Google Reader getting axed. If academic institutions and libraries are using Google Scholar, then wouldn’t having increased utility be protective here?

who needs a diploma when you can have a belt instead??

anyways, i have a phd now and i'll have a baby boy in 9 weeks

Is that a bad thing tho???

I bet they did

Excited to announce that, starting in late August, I’ll be joining Thorsten Kahnt’s lab at the NIDA IRP as a IRTA postdoc! My postdoc research will focus on olfactory functioning and inference-based decision-making in people with HIV and SUD! 😁😁Happy for this next stage after graduating this summer!

last night 👐

every day online I am forced to see the dumbest people

The reward positivity is insensitive to reinforcer devaluation - Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience Successful behavioral adaptation requires an ongoing assessment of rewarding outcomes based on one’s current state. A frontocentral ERP associated with reward feedback, the reward positivity (RewP), h...

experiment 1 of my dissertation is finally live (and open access!) 🥲
link.springer.com/article/10.3...

the job market

Null and Noteworthy—Learning theory validated 20 years later The first published paper from EEGManyLabs’ replication project nullifies a null result that had complicated a famous reinforcement learning theory.

The first published paper to emerge from @eegmanylabs.bsky.social settles a debate 20 years in the making. Read more in this month’s Null and Noteworthy. ‬‬‬‬

By @ldattaro.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/null-and-not...

read broadly.
publish deeply.

Martin, if you need Tokyo recs, know I’m happy to provide. I went to Japan for 3 weeks for my honeymoon with 5 days in Tokyo alone. My husband and I went all over the country and got to see a lot.

expected wood & unexpected safes and vice versa!

How usefulness shapes neural representations during goal-directed behavior The activity of the human prefrontal cortex automatically encodes the usefulness of an item according to the current goal.

such as this paper be one way of examining task-irrelevant rewards? suppose participants rate which object is the most useful/valuable for lighting a fire or anchoring a boat and then complete a task where the goal shifts from lighting a fire > boat anchoring > etc. trials could also have

altogether without examining how RewP varies within paradigms that were the impetus of conceptualizing RPE. that's not to say Pavlovian is the only answer, just that Pav can bring much needed clarification to the current discussion.

btw regarding q's from section 4.1: could a similar task

i get that. i do think alot of RL work dominating EEG involves instrumental conditioning, action selection, S-R association-like tasks, etc. it's a little curious bc RPE came from rescorla-wagner, which developed initially as a model of Pavlovian conditioning. IMO it's difficult to rule out RL

reflects a cog expectation of the reward, so the CR of ♦️might manifest differently than resp to 🍇.

Also surely a response toward S-Rs (e.g., ♦️-> press 👈 -> 🍇==😀) would differ from a response toward S-Os (♦️ 👀 -> 🍇==😀 ) since the representations underlying each assoc structure are different? 😉